NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope resumes search for exoplanets

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has embarked on Campaign 9 of its K2 mission. That means the technical difficulties the spacecraft encountered in recent weeks have now been completely resolved.

NASA has announced on its website that the K2 mission has officially resumed. Over the past week, the agency has been busy reuploading mission parameters, resetting logs and counters, and entering a new command sequence. The telescope is pointed toward the center of the Milky Way for Campaign 9, or C9. This will last until July 1, after which the center of the Milky Way is no longer visible to the spacecraft and Campaign 10 begins. Then Kepler focuses on “an entirely new set of interesting targets in space.”

The problems that NASA itself discovered on April 7 have been overcome but not fully understood. NASA discovered that Kepler had gone into Emergency Mode, but did not know why. In that state, the spacecraft only functions at a low level and consumes a lot of fuel. A few days after the discovery, the agency managed to get Kepler out of this mode and began investigating the problem.

“It looks like it was a one-off event that set off a flood of false alarms. These overpowered Kepler and placed it in Emergency Mode,” NASA said. Because these were false alarms, it was sufficient to switch the systems on board the spacecraft off and on again. The mission has resumed and the investigation into the incident continues. Planet hunter Kepler has been able to track down Earth-like planets several times in the past.